Inverness (Longman Drive) test centre: 45.9% pass rate, £416 to get through it.

3,252 candidates took the car practical test at Inverness (Longman Drive) during 2025/26 and 1,491 of them passed, a pass rate of 45.9%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 255th of 308 on pass rate, and 59th of 67 inside Scotland.

That is 4.2 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 3.5 points below the 49.3% average for Scotland. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 45.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.18 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Inverness (Longman Drive) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.18 times, or £135. Add 1.18 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £281. The test cycle at Inverness (Longman Drive) is therefore about £416. Testing here therefore costs about £54 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Inverness (Longman Drive) was 5.9 weeks in July 2026, 6.0 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.18 expected retakes add only around 7 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 873 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.7% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 664 passes from 1,470 first tests at Inverness (Longman Drive), 45.2% against 45.9% for all attempts. 37 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.52% of them.

Since 2018/19 the pass rate at Inverness (Longman Drive) has risen by 9.5 points, from 36.3% to 45.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 168 to 3,252 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £172 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 45.3% and female candidates at 46.5%, a gap of 1.1 points across 1,802 and 1,450 tests. Automatic tests made up 18.1% of the workload and passed at 39.7%, 6.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 41.7% in October 2025 to 51.1% in February 2026, a 9.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Livingston runs 9.8 points higher at 55.7%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £116 of expected difference. Before moving, price the switch: a new instructor or extra travel for route familiarity typically costs £60 to £120 plus two settling-in lessons, which eats most of a gap under about eight points.